Memeorandum

April 25, 2014

Lacking A Smoking Gun

Following the defeat of affirmative action at the Supreme Court the NY Times runs an impassioned guest piece decrying legacy admissions at elite colleges. The author, Evan J. Mandery, is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Either for lawyerly reasons or because of brainlock, Prof. Mandery omits a critical bit of evidence - nowhere in his vigorous denunciation does he offer any numbers indicating the extent of the problem he has identified. What proportion of seats go to legacies? Having read his article, I still have no idea.

Oh, well. The numbers he does toss out scarcely connect either.

If you have kids, or plan on having them someday, you know that acceptance rates at elite colleges are at historic lows. Stanford led the stingy pack, admitting but 5 percent of applicants, with Harvard and Yale trailing close behind at 5.9 percent and 6.3 percent respectively.

For “legacies,” the picture isn’t nearly so bleak. Reviewing admission data from 30 top colleges in the Economics of Education Review, the researcher Michael Hurwitz concluded that children of alumni had a 45 percent greater chance of admission. A Princeton team found the advantage to be worth the equivalent of 160 additional points on an applicant’s SAT, nearly as much as being a star athlete or African-American or Hispanic.

At Harvard, my alma mater, the legacy acceptance rate is 30 percent, which is not an unusual number at elite colleges. That’s roughly five times the overall rate.

As to the 160 point SAT boost, later we are told that:

In 2003, Harvard’s admissions dean said that the SAT scores of legacy admits were “just two points below the school’s overall average.”

I am not sure how those numbers mesh with the 160 boost claim. Maybe the legacy kids have good SATs but bad high school grades, yet are getting accepted as readily as kids with comparable SAts and higher grades? Maybe. In DIGGING DEEPER, below, this puzzle continues.

The author then segues into Pikkety territory, leaving legacy behind:

One needn’t have a dog in this hunt to be troubled by legacy. It’s disastrous public policy. Because of legacy admissions, elite colleges look almost nothing like America. Consider these facts: To be a 1 percenter, a family needs an annual income of approximately $390,000. When the Harvard Crimson surveyed this year’s freshman class, 14 percent of respondents reported annual family income above $500,000. Another 15 percent came from families making more than $250,000 per year. Only 20 percent reported incomes less than $65,000. This is the amount below which Harvard will allow a student to go free of charge. It’s also just above the national median family income. So, at least as many Harvard students come from families in the top 1 percent as the bottom 50 percent. Of course this says nothing of middle-class families, for whom private college is now essentially unaffordable.

And all the legacy kids are wealthy while none of the non-legacy applicants are? Since we are never offered evidence on either the proportion of legacy admits or their income status we are being asked to assume they are numerous and wealthy. I'd prefer tedious facts. To be fair, however briefly, I'll grant that Harvard alumni probably skew towards the upper income levels relative to the national averages. But I would wager that the background of plausibly qualified Harvard applicants also skews towards higher income levels - on average the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers, bankers and engineers are more likely to be intellectual high-achievers than the sons and daughters of Walmart greeters. ON AVERAGE, not always, but it is averages we are talking about here.

We are offered some progressive orthodoxy:

Together with environmental destruction, social inequality is the defining failure of our generation. The richest .01 percent of American families possess 11.1 percent of the national wealth, but 22 percent of American children live in poverty.

There are only two ways this gets better. One is a huge reformation of the tax structure. The other is improved access to higher education.

Only two ways? I would have thought that improving the K-12 experience for the poor would be valuable, probably even more valuable than tossing them into a collegiate environment for which they are not prepared. But progs don't want to scuffle with the teachers union so forget it.

ERRATA: Somewhere above diligent link-clickers were sent to a story about two young ladies featured at the White HouseScience Fair and a subsequent SOTU address. Mikayla Nelson (of the trailer park and single mom on disability) is a high school senior; she probably knows where she is headed to college but I do not. Amy Chyao (mom and dad are computer engineers) is off to Harvard. So the talented, well-bankrolled non-lagacy is off to Harvard, where she will inflate their SAT and parental income stats; the talented but non-bankrolled non-legacy remains a mystery.

DIGGING DEEPER: The NY Times described one of the studies mentioned by the author and included this (my emphasis):

Mr. Hurwitz’s study, published in “Economics of Education Review,” looked at data from 133,236 applicants for 2007 college admission, and analyzed the outcomes of the 61,962 who applied to more than one of the elite colleges. That allowed him to compare how much more likely they were to be offered admission where they had family connections.

“I was able to take into account all the applicant’s characteristics,” Mr. Hurwitz said, “because they were the same at every school they applied to. About the only thing that would be different was their legacy status.”

Family donations were not included in the data.

On average, Mr. Hurwitz’s study found, legacy applicants had slightly higher SAT scores than others. Education researchers point out that students whose parents attended elite colleges are also more likely to have advantages like family wealth and private school education.

CathyF offers a numerical example of what *might* be going on:

Admission to the schools with the lowest acceptance rates is essentially a crap shoot. Sure, they get some kids applying who are delusional, but the applications to those places are not free, and they take some work to complete, so the applicants do a pretty good job of sorting themselves out if they don't have a chance of getting in. So the schools have 5-10 essentially equivalent applicants for each seat.

Take a numerical example...

You have 40,000 applicants for 1000 seats. Because of the way the admissions game works, half of the kids you offer to will turn you down. (That's means you're REALLY good. The inferior schools get turned down by 70-80% of their admits.) Of the 40,000 applicants, you make a first cut and throw away half of them for not being spectacular. While the bottom half includes all of the delusional types, the 20,000 left are all right up there against the ceiling and basically equivalent candidates.

Because legacies look at the statistics and realize that they have an advantage, they are more likely to apply even though they are not quite good enough, so when the rest of the applicant pool gets the 50-50 cut, 75% of the legacies end up in the bottom half, 25% in the top half.

The school admits all of the legacies in the top half, giving legacies a 25% admission rate. They then go through the rest of the top half and randomly choose students to fill out the rest of the 2000 admission slots. The total admission rate is still 5% (2000 out of 40,000), and the legacies admitted are equivalent [in qualifications - ed.] to the non-legacies admitted.

The key numeric poin here is that at the top-10 schools the admissions officers are not choosing between less-qualified and more-qualified applicants. After they eliminate ALL of the less-qualified applicants, they STILL have way too many left. And it is pretty clear that they are using a combination of favoritism (in favor of legacies, in favor of some racial/ethnic minorities) and total random chance to allocate the admissions among their pool of top candidates.

If the upshot of these studies is that *qualified* legacies get an admissions advantage, that is a different issue than whether favored but otherwise under-qualified ethnics get an advantage.

Mr. Hurwitz’s study, published in “Economics of Education Review,” looked at data from 133,236 applicants for 2007 college admission, and analyzed the outcomes of the 61,962 who applied to more than one of the elite colleges. That allowed him to compare how much more likely they were to be offered admission where they had family connections.

Left unanswered, at least in this summary (and I can't rustle up a bootleg copy of the paper) - are legacies *underadmitted* at competing schools?

The notion, familiar to anyone with college bound kids, is that schools engage in "yield management": a part of the college rating game is showing that a high proportion of students accepted actually choose to enroll at that school. Hence, a massively qualified student that applies to Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Duke may get three Ivy acceptances and a Duke rejection (or wait-list) because Duke knows thay are a mere "safety school".

And does a Harvard legacy with qualifications that make her a star but not a superstar get accepted by Princeton, or do the Princeton admissions people figure they can replace her with an equally qualified candidate who is not likely to end up at Harvard anyway?

Maybe qualified legacies benefit from discrimination at their legacy school and are harmed by discrimination at rival schools managing their yield. That would be consistent with the results and methodology described above.

Lot of what Porchlight, Janet, James D and others have been posting since the Bunday "Negro" remarks.

A taste:

"Since 2008 and before, I’ve been watching the left pummel the right when it comes to issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Republicans have been characterized as hating blacks, wanting to keep women barefoot and pregnant in a 1950s kitchen, and denying gays equal rights under the law. I believe we lost the 2012 presidential election because of such demagoguery.

Time after time, the Democrats have attacked the GOP on contentious social issues. Debate over public policy and solutions to the growing debt, a struggling economy, and government inefficiency have fallen to the wayside as hot-button topics take center stage whenever a Republican or someone related to the GOP says something that’s either politically incorrect, unwise, or easily misconstrued.

Each time, the GOP scrambles like frightened rabbits. How can we fix this? What can we do to avoid these situations in the future? Who can we blame? How can we get people to see that we’re really not racists, homophobes, or sexists? I’ve even fallen for this as I’ve tried to figure out how to talk about women’s issues in the most non-offensive ways."

I once had a debate with a liberal over inheritance taxes whose wish was that the gov't confiscated all wealth when someone dies. He argued that everyone would then be able to start out on the exact same economic level as everyone else.

In response, I told him no, they wouldn't. Because the new capital and inheritance would be the social connections that people and families make through life.

These connections would be passed on from generation to generation, allowing the same families to accumulate wealth during their lifetimes, resulting in just another type of aristocratic feudalism or caste system that he was already arguing against.

He and other liberals can't understand that capitalism allows non-aristocratic families to accumulate wealth and provides for greater social mobility.

Here's the WSJ story on the downgrade. The dueling debt issues are minimal; Russia doesn't owe that much debt (relatively) and holds too little US Debt to have much effect. What is interesting is that Tsar Vlad is making his play to eliminate the Dollar as a reserve currency to the BRICs. The 'scorced earth' stuff is BRICs v. USA/EU. Does Vlad have the muscle to win that? Are China-India-Brazil even with him? Like Hyman Roth, Vlad stays atop a gangster empire by 'always making money for his partners' War is bad for business, has Vlad bitten off too much here? http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304518704579522842578240648?mod=djemalertMARKET&cb=logged0.9597284506734245

"Either for lawyerly reasons or because of brainlock, Prof. Mandery omits a critical bit of evidence"

His possession of the requisite moron's credential obviates any need to establish a factual predicate for his assertion[s]. The new normal approach to sustainable knowledge employs many similar time saving techniques to hasten our arrival in Eudaemonic Unicorn Utopia.

Just wait 'til you see what they're doing with gravity to ease our burden.

If Obama took foreign policy as seriously as he takes golf, it would be an improvement.

I doubt it.

I mean, I doubt Obama takes golf seriously -- in terms of how actual golfers treat the sport.

It's a gentleman's sport that is self-governed. You are expected to follow the rules to the point of penalizing yourself, even if no one is looking.

I assume Obama approaches golf like he does just about everything else. He uses a foot-wedge here, takes a gimme on a six foot putt there, demands a mulligan on each 9, grounds his club in a hazard, allows himself perpetual lift clean and place, and on an on.

I bet if Obama turned in a scorecard of 100, he would have actually shot a 120.

I have no doubts Obama talks during other players' back swings, walks through other players' lines on the green, never rakes a bunker, fills a divot nor repairs a ball mark.

CaptEdM- with a very fair summary of why Obummer is such a failure. In Japan.. Japan!!... where a thousand years of culture directs that saying 'I' in public is rude, distasteful and disrespectful, Obummer announces at a presser what "I can accept'. I assume the Japanese reaction was 'Fuck you Gaijin' GWB used diplomacy and respect to win numerous agreements international cooperation in Iraq, GWOT, India-US relations, Mexico-US relations, Iran sanctions. This Dufus can't get anything done, even when Japan needs the USA more than it has in 50 years. http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/25/obama-flops-on-trade-in-japan/

I’m evolving from "credentialed morons" -- a pithy, delightful phrase but likely to be rejected out of hand by those you are conversing with -- to "mandarins."

Mandarins were bureaucrats highly credentialed with unnecessary skills and poor practices. Misguided mandarins led to the collapse of the Chinese Ming and Qing dynasties 400 and 100 years ago respectively -- a pattern we can't afford to repeat.

The stupid question had a less-stupid purpose: what is the state of relations between the US and Russia (and Obama and Putin)? It was phrased in the stupid form of trying to be cute (if you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?), but the subject is interesting, and extremely relevant.

You may want to sit down for this: Obama took a stupid question and made it more stupid with his answer.

“I absolutely would save Mr. Putin if he were drowning,” Obama said. “I used to be a pretty good swimmer, I grew up in Hawaii.”

Q: President Obama, what is the state of relations with Russia?

Obama: Oh, relations are good. Because I'm awesome.

...and to turn it around...

Q: Mr. Putin, what is the state of relations with the US?

Putin: As long as Obama thinks he's awesome, relations will be exactly where we want them.

My latee m-i-l (the Vile Banshee) was absolutely stone cold deaf for about the final thirty years of her life, which included the entire time I knew her. She got a cochlear implant a couple of years before she died, and unfortunately it failed almost completely. Occasionally she would hear a sound, like a car horn or heels clicking down a hallway, which was quite thrilling to her. But she never got close to hearing speech.

Admission to the schools with the lowest acceptance rates is essentially a crap shoot. Sure, they get some kids applying who are delusional, but the applications to those places are not free, and they take some work to complete, so the applicants do a pretty good job of sorting themselves out if they don't have a chance of getting in. So the schools have 5-10 essentially equivalent applicants for each seat.

Take a numerical example...

You have 40,000 applicants for 1000 seats. Because of the way the admissions game works, half of the kids you offer to will turn you down. (That's means you're REALLY good. The inferior schools get turned down by 70-80% of their admits.) Of the 40,000 applicants, you make a first cut and throw away half of them for not being spectacular. While the bottom half includes all of the delusional types, the 20,000 left are all right up there against the ceiling and basically equivalent candidates.

Because legacies look at the statistics and realize that they have an advantage, they are more likely to apply even though they are not quite good enough, so when the rest of the applicant pool gets the 50-50 cut, 75% of the legacies end up in the bottom half, 25% in the top half.

The school admits all of the legacies in the top half, giving legacies a 25% admission rate. They then go through the rest of the top half and randomly choose students to fill out the rest of the 2000 admission slots. The total admission rate is still 5% (2000 out of 40,000), and the legacies admitted are equivalent to the non-legacies admitted.

The key numeric poin here is that at the top-10 schools the admissions officers are not choosing between less-qualified and more-qualified applicants. After they eliminate ALL of the less-qualified applicants, they STILL have way too many left. And it is pretty clear that they are using a combination of favoritism (in favor of legacies, in favor of some racial/ethnic minorities) and total random chance to allocate the admissions among their pool of top candidates.

A couple of years back ETS did a survey of all of the seniors who had received perfect scores on the SAT. (Since they give the test, they have everybody's address.) Something like 80% of students who got perfect SAT scores had been rejected by at least one of the colleges that they applied to.

Just an anecdote...there are still parents who are busting their butts to ensure their child goes to college. My manicurist is a single mother and has devoted herself to her daughter's education. Her daughter is a senior and her dream is to attend Berklee School of Music. She has been accepted and is so excited.She was at her mother's salon when I went in yesterday. She adores her mother and knows how hard her mother works. She is going to appreciate the oppurtunity her mother has given her and make her proud.

Similar story Marlene,
My closest friend is a single mom with a daughter couple years younger than ours; product of a marriage to a monster.
They lived with us for a few months back when Mrs Ig was in remission and they were getting back on their feet.
Works in a state prison which she hates and doesn't make great money but did everything she could to send her squirt to a good private Christian college up in Northern CA.

How is the number of freshperson students to be admitted to a college determined?

Selective schools (about 10% of the total) look at the number of seats they have, and they make some reasonable statistical presumptions based upon past experience, and calculate how many students they have to admit in order to fill the seats. They use their wait list to control volatility at the margin.

The other 90% admit every single qualified student who applies and recruit hard to get students to apply and to get them to come once they are admitted. Every year ~1/4 of the student body leaves, so every year each of these institutions fights for survival.

The wolverine will be a double legacy should she apply to Harvard. Neither of her parents was a legacy or the beneficiary of AA. Both, however, were valedictorians of their high school classes who scored well on the SATs; her mother was a great athlete and her father a linguistic and science stand out, I say this because some legacies come from outstanding stock and would probably be admitted in any event if they are anything like the genes they inherited and the work ethic they grew up with.

I have 6 years to go before he takes his SAT's and starts applying (I think its still the Jr. year in HS, right). He is a little like wonderboy in that he plays sax, loves the sciences, wants to build robots and write science fiction:) It will be interesting to see in which direction he finally settles but he may end up going to University in Belgium at the University of Antwerp where his grandfather was the president or Leuven where his cousins all went.

So keep me abreast with all you have learned about the process and any hints or advice you can share.

1. He wouldn't be saying that if he had the votes to pass it. I don't know if he delivering a stemwinder to his core supporters to rev them up and didn't realize it would escape their closed circle; but if so it was extremely poor judegement.

2. Howie Carr was subbing for Mark Levin and he started off with this story, stating that, like hit, he tends to give Boehner the benefit of the doubt when Levin goes ballistic, but this was the final straw.

"We have to remember that we are the ones who love individuality and diversity, because we don’t think people should be controlled by a centralized power; that we are the ones who want to see individuals flourish as they compete to the best of their ability without government standing in their way; and that we are the ones who support liberty for all, no matter their skin color, their sexuality, or their gender."

a bit - "We thus have become infinitely “tolerant” of anything but truth itself. Speech is not directed to truth or falsity of an issue but to the “sensitivity” and “compassion” of those who hear it. “Objective” standards are subject to the listener’s “right” to hear only what he wants to hear."

pagar:
I have an interesting anecdote to share wrt college admissions. They practice wait-listing students while they are waiting to hear from those students they have accepted. Many apply to ivy-league schools but have another favorite choice in mind. My student came back to our high school to visit. She had been accepted,finally in June after being wait-listed. Freahman year she was amazed to find out all the people on her dorm floor had originally been wait-listed.

JiB, we are starting our 2nd go-round at the college admissions game with WonderGirl and we never really stopped the sideline of helping all of the kids' friends get in to college.

The number one rule is that kids today need to apply to enough places. Back when we were in college, an application was a significant investment of time and money. You had to fill it out with a typewriter! So prudent kids applied to 3-5 places (5 was a LOT) -- with 1 or 2 solid should-get-in schools, 1 or 2 a-reach-but-still-plausible schools, a backup sure-to-get-in school -- and we were done.

WonderBoy applied to 19 schools -- was accepted outright by 13, rejected by 2, and wait-listed by 4. The pattern of which was which shows both the randomness and gamesmanship of it. Yes, wait-listed by Yale but outright rejected by Cornell? Accepted by the University of Chicago and wait-listed by Wash U? Really?

Part of it, too, is understanding how the college rankings are determined. The criteria for "selectivity" is partly based upon the number and caliber of the students that a school rejects, and another part is the number and caliber of the students who decline the offer of admission. Which is a HUGE incentive for schools to send rejections to superstar students, especially the superstars that they are pretty sure are going to turn them down if admitted. And given a large enough sample of kids, there are outliers on both sides. A couple of kids who get accepted everywhere and then a couple of superstars who get rejected everywhere because all of the top places decide that somebody else is going to get the kid and don't even bother trying. Sort of like the stunningly beautiful girl with no date to the prom because all of the boys figure that they don't have a chance.

Next tip, along the same lines -- if Frederick really wants to go to a particular school, let the admissions officers know. Playing coy is no way to get you to stand out in the crowd. Wash U plays the ranking games pretty hard core -- they ask what other schools you are applying to, and they ask where your parents went to college. It looks to me like Wash U decided to wait-list him because they figured (correctly) that he was sure to get into University of Chicago, and the chances that someone would turn down the UofC for Wash U are pretty small. On the other side, the UofC figured he was a sure thing because he was a double legacy, although the experiences that DrF and I had there made it a lot LESS likely that he would go there.

(Because WonderBoy got rejected by Princeton and accepted and is at Notre Dame, WonderGirl's ambition is to get accepted at Princeton AND Notre Dame, so that she can turn Princeton down and go to ND. I'm not sure if this is more or less shallow than the glee that DrF and I expressed when UofC admitted WonderBoy and then he told them to get lost!)

Another tip, that seems more obvious than it is -- make sure that Frederick really wants to go to every school that he applies to! Because of how the admissions game works now, he could very well end up at one of his backup schools. For the reasons above he could very well end up being rejected by a backup school, so make sure he has several.

One of the statistics quoted about schools is the "middle 50%" test scores. If a school says their middle 50% ACT is 28-32, that means that a score of 28 is the 25th percentile while a score of 32 is the 75th percentile. With a score of 27 or 28, Frederick would have an excellent chance of getting in to such a school (25% of the students there did exactly that), but he needs to realize that he is going to spend a lot of time feeling inferior to the people around him. A school with a middle 50% of 24-28 puts him closer to the middle of the pack. Likewise, if he gets a 35 ACT, he is going to have a hard time being challenged at the 24-28 school.

On the other hand, realize that not all programs are equal at a school. Especially because there are way too many students in college who have no business being there, many schools have bifurcated into parallel separate colleges. They may be excellent in the things he cares about even though the average student is not up to his standards.

One last tip that doesn't so much apply to you -- pick a rich school if you are poor. If you live in a state that is broke *cough* Illinois *cough* then stay away from public colleges. They are frightfully expensive, huge amounts of their limited budgets are wasted on stupid bureaucratic DMV-style stuff, and they are likely to cut costs (and raise tuition) by limiting class sections so that it takes 5-6 years to graduate. Schools that have been around for at least 100 years have generations of generous alumni who have endowed their scholarship funds. The fact that WonderBoy goes to a school that has more money than God has meant all sorts of incredible opportunities for him.

If the upshot of these studies is that *qualified* legacies get an admissions advantage, that is a different issue than whether favored but otherwise under-qualified ethnics get an advantage.

My point is that the schools fall into three different types:

a) Top-10 schools, who have admit rates in the 5%-10% rate.

b) The rest of the selective schools, who turn down qualified students.

c) The vast majority of schools, who admit everybody who is qualified whom they can convince to apply.

The group (a) schools have so many applicants and so many of them are ridiculously qualified, that they can populate their student body however they please with highly qualified students. Want a super-genius Latina lesbian in a wheelchair with one brown eye and one blue? Sure -- do you want the blue eye to be right or left? The minorities admitted to Harvard, Princeton and Yale are NOT any less qualified than the whites and asians, the point is that the very top schools are admitting a higher fraction of the minority applicants.

Which brings us to the group (b) schools, which are the schools we are arguing about, where the minorities given preferences are significantly less qualified than the whites and asians admitted. The flagship state schools, top-flight private schools, etc. The point is that THESE schools are populated by the highly-qualified rejects from Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Who are virtually all white and asian (and disproportionately asian) because Harvard, Princeton and Yale all three scooped up virtually ALL of the equally-qualified blacks and latinos.

It's math. If the very elite schools take the very elite minorities and the 1st-rate minorities, and the 1st-rate schools take all of the 2nd-rate and 3rd-rate minorities, the 2nd-rate schools get the 4th-rate, 5th-rate and 6th-rate minorities, etc., then at the top the minorities are not different from the rest of the population, but the further down the ladder you go the bigger the mis-match between the quality of the minority students and the quality of the white and asian students. (There is also a similar problem where the asians get further above the white students the further down the totem pole that you go, but it's not nearly so glaring simply because there are so many more whites than asians.)

Then there is the group (c) schools, which is the largest group and where the vast majority of students are. The problem is that the mismatch between the black/hispanic students gets bigger and bigger the further down you go. So you have the schools with the middle-50 in the 28-32 ACT range, and virtually all of the blacks/hispanics in those schools have ACTs in the 24-26 range. NOT because there aren't lots of black/hispanics with ACTs between 28 and 32, but because those kids are all in schools where the middle-50 is 32-35. Where they are ALL much more likely to fail because wherever they are is behind wherever the whites/asians are in the particular school that they are at.

But, anyway, after the incredibly long-winded post, the bottom line with preferences is NOT the Harvard/Princeton/Yale examples -- all of those minorities are superstars. The problem is with the selective-but-not-that-selective schools, where there are not nearly enough blacks/hispanics to go around who are as good as the whites/asians, because Harvard/Princeton/Yale have gobbled up way more than their share.

That is a perfect description of The Bell Curve on action. If each school takes its slice of the population with a particular academic range of ability, there is a very uncomfortable (as in PC cringeworthy) mix across the ethnic curves. Trying to shove the separate ethnic curves into alignment at the same percentiles leaves the kids in the 'sure to fail' spot, because they never had a chance there.

The other rude math reality that Murray inferred was how the respective tails of the distributions 'exaggerates' those ethnic differences.

If Frederick thinks he wants to go to school in Belgium, you may have to see if there's a good IB school around.

I agree with everything Cathyf says, but you also have to bear in mind that the schools have to have fairly qual numbers of men and women, people who play the instruments the band/orchestra needs, girls who row or play squashetc. Grades are just a part of it,

At my Uni, Admissions also weighted applicants by geography. They were inordinately proud of being able to say "Our student body consists of students from all 50 states, as well as (big number) countries!"

That's not exactly news on Sterling. The only reason its getting any mention now by the TMZ jeanyusses is because this is the first time in recent memory that the Clip Joint is any good. I'm sure the NBA is stuck with him as long as his checks clear.

Speaking of band and diversity and quotas, the way that it works in the ND Marching Band is that all of the trumpets who are adequate make it into the band, and then that determines the size of the band for that year. Each other section cuts kids until they are down to the size that is proportional to the number of trumpets.

Quite obviously the worst clarinet player is better than the worst trumpet player...

(When WonderBoy was a sophomore, he tried out for district chorus as a tenor I. He called me to tell me that he got in. I happened to ask how many other tenor I's got in -- 23 was the answer. Then I asked how many tried out -- 22. They took every tenor I who tried out, plus twisted an arm... The Soprano II's, though, had about 60-70 try out for 25 spots.)